Kibana 5.0.0-alpha4 released

The moment is finally here, and after only 26 days and a bunch of internal delays that we don’t like to talk about, we are stoked to release Kibana 5.0.0-alpha4, or the Alpha to End All Alphas.

Folks, if alphas were ears, features would be coming out of this one. And this ball of wax is only one click away (ok, two clicks).

As usual, become an Elastic Pioneer by opening a bug report today and earn yourself some free stuff.

IMPORTANT: This is alpha software that will only work with Elasticsearch 5.0.0-alpha4. Please test it, but do not use it in production. Indices created in this version will not be compatible with Elasticsearch 5.0.0 GA. Upgrading 5.0.0-alpha4 to any other version is not supported.

Import data from a CSV

You read that right. For the first time ever, you can import CSV data into your Elasticsearch cluster via Kibana. Via the new “Upload CSV” tool under the also-new “Management” application, you can simply drag and drop a CSV of your choosing and we’ll let you review a sample of the results, tweak the mappings, name an index pattern, and Kibana does the rest.

Monitor your Kibana instance with X-Pack

In addition to the new and improved Elasticsearch monitoring capabilities, you now get Kibana monitoring with your free basic license of X-Pack. Keep track of requests, response times, memory usage, and more.

Disable visualization buckets, and drag to sort as well

Have you ever been in the situation where you meticulously set up a range aggregation on a sub-bucket in Kibana but want to temporarily remove it? Or how about move it to the top of a list of other buckets? Well, in our ongoing effort to single-handedly stop global warming, we decided to embrace micro-optimizations for energy usage by lowering the amount of clicks necessary.

Or maybe we just got fed up with the tedium of rebuilding our range aggregations all the time. In any case, you can now sort buckets by dragging and dropping or disable them entirely rather than removing them.

Settings is gone. Long live Management!

This isn’t really a new feature in its own right - the new Management app still has the old capabilities of the Settings app, but it’s structured to enable a ton of features that we’re planning in the near and long term. Management is your window into the Elastic stack. This is where you’ll go to set up Kibana, configure users and roles in X-Pack security, and even add or manage data in your Elastic stack.

Bugs n’ stuff

In addition to screenshot-worthy features, we’ve also added a bunch of other improvements and bug fixes, including these highlights:

Auto-refresh interval is now persisted when you save a dashboard #7365

What’s next?

Beta, baby! For real this time. We still have a bunch of features we want to get into 5.0.0, and we’re simultaneously focusing more and more on the spit and polish that we all demand of a stable release.

For now, download the alpha4 release and help us track down those remaining issues. Bugs can be filed on Github, and feedback is always appreciated on our forums. As always, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or IRC as well.